India’s Chief Justice Surya Kant said two days ago that he had no time to watch videos of police action against protesters. Two days later he is claiming that the media reports saying he refused to list (fix a hearing date for) the petition over police action against student protesters are “completely false.”
According to reports by Live Law and various other outlets, the chief justice claimed that no writ petition had been filed in the Supreme Court on the matter at all.
Amid the police action, Chief Justice Surya Kant has become a particular figure in this continuing movement. A remark he made in May angered young people. He had said: “Some youths wander around like cockroaches, with no employment and no place in the professional world.” It was partly in mocking response to this that the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) was formed.
This party has for months been putting pressure on Narendra Modi’s government with its demand for the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. They are continuing a sit-in at Jantar Mantar. About 75,000 people joined their march towards the parliament building on July 22, according to local media reports. At that time police baton-charged students indiscriminately. They fired tear-gas shells and fell upon the protesters using pellet guns and nail-studded batons.
The chief justice had told Narendra Mishra, the lawyer who filed the plea on July 22 challenging the police action against the protesters: “Do not waste our time and do not waste your time either.”
When the lawyer said there was video of the police’s excessive use of force, the chief justice said: “We have no interest in the videos; we have no time to watch them.”
Exactly two days later, today, Friday, July 24, the chief justice is saying that without a formal petition being filed, a mere memorandum cannot be treated as a writ petition.
Chief Justice Surya Kant has described the media reports of his remarks as “irresponsible and reckless.”
According to Live Law, the chief justice said that over the past two days a completely false statement had been spread that the case had supposedly been filed. The media, taking no responsibility, had put out false news that the chief justice had refused to list the case.
Surya Kant claimed: “Not a single page had been filed as of 10 a.m. today. That was only a memorandum … which that Mishra, or someone, had sent. How can I treat a memorandum as a writ petition? And people started publishing reckless news about all this.”
The report said the chief justice made the remarks when senior lawyer Shoaib Alam mentioned another matter for a hearing.
Most media outlets had put more emphasis on his oral remarks than on his reluctance to list the case on an urgent basis.
A day earlier, Chief Justice Surya Kant had said in the morning that if the Supreme Court metro station was not opened by 3 p.m., the top court would intervene. The authorities had closed 17 metro stations the previous day, causing severe hardship not only to the protesters but also to ordinary working people and service providers.
The constitutional-law expert and former president of the Supreme Court Bar Association, Dushyant Dave, said in a special interview with the media personality Karan Thapar that the chief justice’s remark had been irresponsible and insensitive.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report